Going inside the fan funnel | 3 simple steps sports organizations can take to establish a fan journey

The “fan journey” can sometimes be regarded as a loose term – something the sports industry uses to help rights holders and sports organizations differentiate their casual supporters from the fanatics and to identify the types of digital assets required to capture and convert new fans.?

Behind the scenes, the reality is that all fans are unique; it’s the detail in the data that connects them. All the while, fan intelligence helps rights holders decide on how to personalize their digital content campaigns based on customer preferences and habits, and go on to develop a clear digital strategy designed?to grow and retain their respective fan bases .

As with developing any business strategy, internal decisions need to be made with the customer front of mind. So, for sports organizations looking to establish a fan journey, or commonly known as the fan funnel, the first question you need to ask yourself is whether you know your fan’s attributes – what is it they like, what they don’t like, and the consumption behaviors they demonstrate. Based on that, if you have a good set of data, you can start to define at which stage your fan base converges, which platforms are best equipped for engaging them, and how they fit to your fan funnel.

It sounds simple – however, if you don’t first have the dataset, or the digital touchpoints to capture fan data, you will need to look closer within the few channels you do leverage and make certain assumptions based on the content that performs well and what your gut tells you. In our upcoming?Olympic Digital Transformation Report 2023, which will be published soon (Subscribe here to receive it ??), N3XT SPORTS research shows, for example, that as many as one in five (21.8 percent) of the International Federations (IF) represented at next year’s Paris 2024 Olympic Games do not yet collect first-party fan data via their platforms, while only half (50 percent) do so via a diverse digital inventory.

Nevertheless, while the reality is that there are many sports organizations which are unclear on how to measure the fan journey effectively, it’s worth highlighting that there are other ways for them to analyze fan behavior based on their existing digital channels and to go on to leverage these findings to expand their own digital offering while widening the fan funnel over time.

It goes without saying that the sports industry is evolving rapidly, and data transformation is playing a key role within its evolution. Here, we will explore several simple steps sports organizations can take to establish their own fan journey and tips for expanding their D2C portfolio in a way that enables the rights holder to implement a fan funnel, measure fan behavior, and drive audience retention every step of the way.

1. SPORTS PROPERTIES MUST FIRST DEFINE THEIR FAN & DIGITAL ASSETS

By defining their customers and the different types of fans, sports organizations create what we call either a “channel matrix” or “channel strategy”. This outlines what the organization should be doing across each of its digital assets and, equally, what is missing from each of these platforms. This might, for example, require an examination of your Facebook channel versus the website to see where they can work together. While they are among the most common platforms sports organizations usually adopt, these act as the first two sensible steps any entity can take in their data transformation.

By taking this simple step, this allows your organization to prioritize tasks for each platform and assess which one will have the most impact on engaging the customer or fan, versus the one which will help convert them as loyal fans thereafter. This, for those organizations that do not yet have?a diverse digital inventory ?but are looking for ways to augment the fan experience, helps to define: (1) each stage of the fan funnel: (2) what their purpose should be; and (3) where they should sit on the fan journey.

At this point, for those organizations that don’t own a diverse set of fan data, they can benchmark against other properties that do – such as the?National Basketball Association (NBA) , which is transforming the way the North American basketball league and its franchise teams capture fan data via mobile. Elsewhere, N3XT Sports worked with EuroLeague Basketball, the top tier of European basketball, to enhance its customer relationship management (CRM) capability and introduce a single sign-on (SSO) within its digital portfolio.?

By taking inspiration from industry peers, sports properties at the beginning of their digital transformation journey can look to emulate ‘best practice’, then tailor what works to their digital strategy and strip out what doesn’t. This includes how data governance supports fan engagement and optimizes the digital experiences within the fan funnel.

2. DATA & DIGITAL MATURITY UNDERPINS THE DIVERSITY OF THE FAN FUNNEL

One of the key steps to aligning fan intelligence with the sports organization’s business objectives is to implement a CRM function that makes it easy to manage the fan journey and meet each individual customer’s needs. However, in order to understand your customer personally, it isn’t enough to simply integrate a new system without first leveraging the means to ingest and analyze fan data. So, it is safe to say that a certain level of data maturity or sophistication is required for a CRM function to be truly impactful.

For example, at the top level of the funnel, organizations will own the basic level of data that comes with their website or social media channels. In order to convert fans into loyal customers within your CRM system, it becomes more challenging without other digital touchpoints such as?an owned and operated over-the-top (OTT) streaming platform ?or a dedicated mobile app to engage fans and leverage their personal attributes.?

Therefore, sports properties are advised to adopt a subscription model which consolidates user interactions via an SSO rather than to ask fans to sign up to each individual platform separately. This helps the entity to centralize its fan data with minimal effort, while enhancing: (1) the user experience (UX) across your digital portfolio; (2) the organization’s digital and data maturity, which directly correlates with the breadth of its fan journey; and (3) the entity’s CRM capability by centralizing fan datasets and?removing data silos ?from its digital framework.

3. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SUPPORTS DATA MANAGEMENT AT EVERY STAGE OF THE FAN FUNNEL

No matter the data maturity of an organization, whether it collects email data via a newsletter subscription at the early stages of the fan journey or provides an SSO across a diverse digital portfolio, artificial intelligence (AI) can support data management at every level of the fan funnel. For example,?OpenAI and other machine learning models adopt what we call a “garbage in, garbage out” approach , which helps simplify the organization’s data management by identifying trends in the data it owns and cutting out redundant datasets.?

According to?Forbes Advisor , customer service (56 percent) and cybersecurity (51 percent) are among the most popular business uses for AI – whereas, as it stands, AI is used less for audience segmentation (24 percent) than it is for CRM (46 percent) and content production (35 percent). Sports properties are continually finding new ways to implement AI tools to increase productivity and engagement, such as?the creation of personalized, generative video content and highlights , customer-service chatbots, push notification, as well as – of course – the distribution of real-time athlete data during live sports broadcasts.

Whereas AI adoption is still an early concept for sports business analytics and is often presented as a single offering, it can actually serve the rights holder at every stage of its data and digital development, including the evolution of the fan journey. This includes the property’s ability to measure fan conversion rates based on their behavior and to identify the types of content and marketing campaigns that have the biggest impact on audience retention.?

With human-like prompts, you can then proceed to augment your fan funnel by asking the data any question you’d like; the AI will be able to deliver you the relevant insights. For example, you can apply AI to analyze your database, manage and optimize data storage, and to single out a process that you require amongst hundreds of thousands of data points. Find out more in our recent article about?how OpenAI and machine learning is serving sport’s data transformation .

WHAT’S N3XT?

At N3XT Sports, we offer two distinct roles to our clients when it comes to the fan funnel. Firstly, it is our job to help them understand how to implement technological solutions that measure the fan journey, including the stages of the fan funnel which will provide the biggest return on investment (ROI). Secondly, we support our clients on the development and delivery of their bespoke digital roadmap, including a clear timeline for implementing tools and D2C products into the fan funnel.

Our team is constantly assessing the different ways the latest software solutions and D2C platforms can be tailored to our clients’ needs and how they can continue to diversify their digital inventory and data-collection capability. For example,?N3XT Sports is supporting United World Wrestling (UWW)’s digital transformation ?by helping to expand the Olympic wrestling federation’s digital inventory and deliver CRM efficiencies.

Elsewhere, our team continues to serve the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA) and how the union serves its members digitally. Our collaboration has seen the PFA roll out respective?member and employee portals ?designed to enhance the customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX) in tandem, while also increasing its data maturity and the strength of its customer relationships within a digital-first operation.?